reflections of mine others might find useful

Last Sunday was the series finale for LOST and before too much time goes by I want to write my reflections about it. I must admit that I have been a Lost addict for the past two years, when a friend loaned me the first two seasons on DVD. After that we Forstroms (minus Cindy) found ourselves utterly captivated.

We don’t have tv service so we’ve watched seasons 3-6 on abc.com. It became our Wednesday-night-after-youth-group tradition and the girls and I had great times together watching it together. We enjoyed trying to figure out the unexplained mysteries and found the character development extremely interesting. There seemed to be a lot of religious and mythological symbolism, which made us curious about where the show was heading.

THINGS I’M GLAD ABOUT.

Experiencing this with my girls. It was like a weekly “Daddy Date” and it gave us a lot of time together and ongoing conversations about where the storyline was going. I’ll never regret the time spent with them. We’d stay up as late as we needed to to have our weekly LOST experience together. Homework always took a back seat to LOST!

I was captivated by the complexity of the storytelling, the beautiful scenery, the haunting musical score, the compelling characters, and the intrigue of the mysterious storyline.

I thoroughly enjoyed having conversations about it with other friends and co-workers who were likewise addicted to the show. It was a lot of fun trying to figure out what this-or-that meant or where that came from, or what ever happened to so-and-so.

There was so much to remember and try to unwravel. Right to the end we kept wondering who were the good guys and who were the bad guys and who was behind it all. That made it especially intriguing and fun.

THE FINALE

Part of the weekly enjoyment of the mystery was my assumption that — in the end — the mysteries would be explainable and have meaning. I was somewhat disappointed to find that the finale left many of the questions unanswered (which I somewhat expected, since there were so many loose ends). But my real disappointment was to discover that many of the show’s unexplained mysteries were irrelevant in the end anyways. It didn’t really matter who the good and bad guys were. It didn’t really matter who died, who’s name was on the wall, who took over Jacob’s job as the “island keeper”, who travelled through time, who destroyed the submarine, who escaped on the airplane, who stayed behind, whether the island sank or time-shifted, who lived-together or died-alone, who pushed a button every 108 minutes, who bought a fried chicken franchise, who rode in a wheelchair, etc. Not much of what happened during the 121 episodes seemed to matter much in the end. At the end of the finale all the characters mysteriously converged together in some alternate-reality in an ecumenical churchlike building and they were all at peace. In the end the only relevant thing seemed to be how they had bonded with each other during their experiences. This existentialist ending left me feeling strung along or duped. I felt unsatisfied.

The ending also made me wonder about some things.

THINGS I’M QUESTIONING.

Whether I would have watched the show had I known the mysteries were going to be largely unanswered and irrelevant anyways.

If spending 100 hours watching Lost was good stewardship of my time.

If I became desensitized to the depictions of sin in the show (language, immorality, torture, murder, etc.), justifying them because I thought the show would end with a beneficial “moral to the story.”

Whether my passion for LOST was at times greater than my passion for God. Beyond the 100 hours of the show I certainly spend many more hours contemplating Lost’s mysteries and talking about it.

What is it about LOST that appealed to me so much and kept me so hooked? Was it the quest for the mysteries’ answers (which mostly never came anyways)? Was it the character development (which actually worked backwards so that in the end everyone’s characters melded into emotionless melancholy in some alternate-reality world)?

If I’d have known the ending at the beginning would I have been so captivated by it?

Will I spend another hundred hours and watch the whole series again? This one I can answer: No.